Intel unwraps value chips

Celeron chips clocked at 900Mhz and a mobile version at 850Mhz are now available, hard on the heels of the 1.8Ghz and 1.6Ghz P4 releases. ...more

Judge kills off SCO claims

SCO has had the lion's share of the examples it put forward as evidence of the 'misappropriation' by IBM ripped from its case. Judge Brooke Wells issued an order granting an IBM motion to dismiss SCO's claims due to lack of specificity: from a list of nearly 200 claims contested by IBM, just 10 remain - essentially removing two-thirds of SCO's contention. Aside from lack of specificity as to what exactly the code in question is, the straw that broke the Judge's patience is that SCO required far greater levels of specificity from IBM when requesting materials for evidence throughout the discovery period: a level of exactitude to which it was unable, or unwilling, to rise itself. ...more

Lycos declares 'make love not spam' - or else

Lycos users are being invited to strike back at the spammers. Visitors to the company's European sites are being invited to join the 'make love not spam' campaign. By downloading a screensaver users can gang up and mount a denial of service attack on spammers' servers. ...more

Half-price no frills

BT Retail has cut the start-up price of its 'no frills' broadband offering to just ?30, until 20 September. No frills is a wires-only service; BT Retail, unlike most other ISPs, leaves the customer free to buy their own modem or router. On top of the start-up fee, which is half the normal price, BT retail charges ?27 per month, making it cheaper than AOL, BT Openworld and Freeserve, though not as cheap as many of the smaller ISPs. ...more

Microsoft updates SQL Server 2005 with SP2

Vista compatibility and a number of new features have come to SQL Server 2005, Microsoft's flagship database system, with the release of Service Pack 2 (SP2). As well as integration with Windows Vista and Office 2007, new features of SP2 include: improved data mining (for use directly within Excel 2007 and Visio 2007); integration with the Report Center in SharePoint to enable the consumption of SQL Server data within SharePoint; and Oracle support in the database's Report Builder feature. In terms of manageability improvements, Microsoft says it responded to customer feedback in providing improvements in database maintenance plans, management reports and a new copy database wizard. ...more